The Interrogation
by mantisbelle
Summary: Capture was the absolute last thing that Hazel needed to have to deal with. He never could have expected to see interrogation from his long lost son, however.


**A/N: This is the last of the "Hazel is Oscar's Dad" fics that I've written. You might want to read the rest of the series in order before touching this one or you might end up a bit lost. They are in order: Sins of the Father, Unsent Letters, and Derailed. Thank you for reading!**

* * *

On the list of all the things in the world of which he was sure he could be certain, regretting his capture was ranking very high.

In fact, Hazel was certain that along with a few other choice moments and bad decisions, he would carry this particular regret to his grave. He tried not to think about his own death too much, though. There were some realities that were just too difficult to face.

But even then, there was no ignoring the gravity of the situation and everything that it entailed. Hazel had already taken the time to construct a list of everything that he was going to have to be aware of on some level. He was sure that interrogation was on the slate, and Hazel really didn't like how his stomach churned at the thought. He was sure that he would see execution once they were through with him. He was sure that if they didn't kill him, he would be left to rot.

No chance at redemption, not that he really deserved it.

Regardless, Hazel refused to be the one to let any of Salem's many secrets slip out. He was better that, even if he was now captured and unable to escape.

Hazel was angry at himself. He wasn't just angry at himself for his capture, but for the reason that he'd been captured.

Some warrior he was, getting stopped dead in his tracks because he'd thought that he'd seen a ghost. It hadn't been the first time that it had happened, but the first time the stakes hadn't been as high. Back then, he'd been free to go back to the fortress and deal with his frustrations.

This time, he hadn't been nearly so lucky.

Hazel shifted uncomfortably in the makeshift cell that he'd been placed in located under one of the academies and tried to ignore the pain that he felt centered around his wrists. Aura suppressing handcuffs were something that Hazel had never wanted to experience, and yet here he was. He'd heard stories about how bad they were, and they were definitely living up to the hype.

Distantly, he heard the sound of a door opening as someone made their way down to the area where he was being held. Hazel didn't actually know how long he'd been there, but he'd been counting the visits that came. Usually it was one of the adults coming, always seeking answers and playing the same mind games.

Three times, he'd been brought food.

Six times, he'd been given water. 

Once, he'd also been given a quick check for injuries.

This was the tenth visit in all, Hazel reminded himself as he made himself more comfortable in the back of the cell in an attempt to relax. The last thing that he wanted to have to do was go into an interrogation when he was already on edge. Keeping calm was something that he was good at- it had been the bread and butter of his existence for over a decade now, after all.

"Hello?" The voice made Hazel snap his head up and finally get his first good look at his visitor.

This time, there were no adults. Instead, it was just a boy standing there in front of him, with green and hazel flecked eyes that were enough to make Hazel freeze in his tracks.

Of all the potential visitors, this was the one that he'd wanted to deal with the least.

Hazel grunted his greeting, not wanting to let himself come off as verbose or otherwise willing to talk in a situation like this one. It was an act of pure self-preservation.. Hazel knew better than to let any weaknesses show in a situation like the one that he was in now. To some degree, he had to call back on his training at Beacon to keep calm.

The only thing was that Hazel had never thought that he'd have to do this over a child. 

Why did he feel so afraid to face a child, after everything he'd seen and done?

Hazel knew why. Facing it was just difficult.

The boy took a step or two forward, closer to the bars that Hazel was being held behind. Hazel watched him, but he didn't dare move.

No weaknesses.

"You're Hazel, right?" The boy asked, reaching over for a folded metal chair that was leaned against the wall opposite Hazel's cell. "Can I talk to you?"

"Why?" Hazel replied, deciding not to answer the boy's first question for no reason other than it was what made him feel safe and comfortable with everything put into consideration. "What do you think you'll learn?"

The boy- Oscar Pines, Hazel knew. He couldn't think about him with that name. That was too wrong, it was too heavy. It put Hazel in too vulnerable of a position if he let himself get wrapped up in it. "I..." Oscar paused. "You know who I am, right?"

"Do I?" Hazel answered, still not wanting to let the other too close. It was safer that way. It was safer to imagine this boy as a dead child.

"I think so." Oscar said quietly. "My name is Oscar. Oscar Pine. I'm-"

"I know." Hazel mumbled before the boy could finish.

"Right." Oscar paused and stared down at his hands like he thought there would be some sort of answer there. Some sort of comfort. Something that was going to be enough to make the universe make sense when everything was already so wrong and twisted. "Oscar Pine."

Hazel raised an eyebrow, unsure of how to answer that statement. It almost sounded like Oscar wasn't even comfortable saying that was his name. Like there was something wrong. It almost left Hazel worrying, but that was only an 'almost' because Hazel didn't want to let himself actually feel something over this boy.

Too dangerous, he knew.

"And?" Hazel answered. "Why do you-"

"You're my father, aren't you?" Oscar said, picking his head up and giving what could only be described as a death stare.

Oscar was asking him exactly the question that Hazel had been hoping wouldn't be asked. The boy looked a little too confident as he stood there, a little too proud and strong. Despite all of that, he was tiny. Small in all the ways that reminded Hazel of the boy's mother.

Even now, as he sat there and stared at the boy, all that Hazel could think was that the boy looked too much like his mother.

"I may be." Hazel replied after a long moment. "Is there a reason you ask?"

"Is there-" Oscar started, his eyes widening and anger beginning to read clearly across that face of his. "Of course there's a reason!"

Hazel closed his eyes and let out a quiet sigh.

"Of course.' He mumbled after a long moment. "What will you do if I give you an answer?"

It was a question that Hazel wasn't expecting to hear any sort of answer from Oscar about. It wasn't a good one, it was one that required that Hazel be willing to talk about difficult topics.

It required that Oscar be willing to hear about them.

But there was something that Hazel could only describe as being distinctly off about the boy. There was a moment where he pulled his eyes away from Hazel and mumbled something to someone else.

Hazel wondered whether or not someone else had come with Oscar, despite the fact that he hadn't heard a sound from anyone else. Oscar's footsteps had been the only ones heading down to where he was being held.

"I know." Oscar said quietly. "He's-" A pause lingered, and Hazel said nothing. All that he did was lean in slightly and watch the boy talk and try to mull over whatever it was that was in his head at the moment. "I'm pretty sure."

Hazel leaned back in the cell, resting his head back against the stone wall behind him and listening in for any explanation for what was happening.

None came.

Oscar finally looked back up at him.

"You're Hazel Rainart." He said finally.

That was interesting, Hazel thought to himself. He couldn't think of a time where he'd given the boy his name. Unless someone else had mentioned it to him, Hazel didn't know how Oscar would have known it.

If this really was his son, then he suspected that the boy would have been too young to know his surname. Hazel had lost his family when Oscar had been just a young child. Barely even out of diapers.

"I am." Hazel confirmed for the boy. "And you are Oscar Pine."

"I... am." Oscar said, leaning forward and watching Hazel closely like there was something of interest there. "Are you my father?"

"You haven't answered my question." Hazel said quietly. "What will you do if I answer?"

"I don't know." Oscar admitted. "I guess that I'd have a few questions."

"I'd expect that."

"So you are?"

"Yes." Hazel said finally, letting the lone word linger between the two of them for as long as they needed to. Oscar would understand his situation, at least that was what Hazel was hoping for. It was a deeply complex situation as a baseline. There was no need to complicate things any further than they already were.

Of course, at this point, not doing that was probably impossible.

"You..." Oscar's voice trailed off after the lone syllable. "Why did you leave us?"

Us.

Hearing that word from Oscar was almost too much for Hazel, but he didn't dare let the fact that it was affecting him show at all. It was for the best that Oscar wasn't able to see the depths of Hazel's vulnerabilities.

But 'us' brought a reality to the situation.

There was someone in the equation that was unaccounted for.

Hazel looked up at the ceiling, not wanting to give Oscar an answer, if only because he was too aware of the threats that would come if he did. At the very least, he couldn't bring himself to look at Oscar and see the eyes of a dead woman, mixed with his own eyes all in one.

When the boy had been born, Hazel had loved his eyes for what they'd been.

Now, that wasn't the case. 

Now, Hazel couldn't help but look at the boy with bitterness welling up in his chest.

"Are you sure that this is something that you want to know?" Hazel asked.

"Yes." Oscar replied, keeping his voice as even as possible. It wasn't confident. All that Hazel was able to pick up on was the nervousness there. "I am."

"Fine." Hazel mumbled. "If you must know, I didn't leave you."

"But you definitely-"

"No." Hazel replied. "Listen to me."

This was it. This was the part where he had to actually try to explain himself to Oscar, for better or for worse.

Oscar quieted down and sat up straight in his seat, balling his hands into fists in his lap and staring down at the floor. "Okay."

"I was a huntsman." Hazel mumbled. Oscar's eyes widened at the words, but he didn't dare give the boy a chance to react to him. Hazel needed to be able to do this without facing too much interruption from the boy. "And work brought me away from home a lot."

"But-"

"I was too late, Oscar." Hazel muttered angrily. "I left for a job, and I was coming home when I heard what had happened."

"But you weren't there-"

"I tried to be." Hazel answered his son in hopes that he'd be able to find some sort of understanding in him. "I had to go as fast as I possibly could get there." He shook his head. "And when I got there, you and your mother was long gone."

"But we weren't!" Oscar replied, his voice rising in both pitch and volume. Frustration. "We'd-"

Hazel paused, took a deep breath and decided that it might have been for the best if he made some effort to change the discussion and the narrative. He needed to get Oscar's explanation for everything that had happened, if only because that was going to be what he needed to work off of.

"What happened that night?" Hazel asked, looking up at Oscar now more directly.

"We were home." Oscar said, keeping his voice down. "Mom kept saying that you were going to get home that night."

"I was." Hazel confirmed. "That is true."

"And then someone came to the house. Knocked on the door and said that they were looking-" Oscar paused, finally looking up at Hazel directly with narrowed angry eyes. "For you."

"What happened next?" Hazel asked, still keeping his tone even. He had to do his best to ignore how his heart was speeding up in his chest. He had to ignore the lingering scent of wood smoke in his nostrils, and the way that it seemed to cling to him after so many years. Fear was still there, never relenting and too intense the entire time. It was never going to let him go.

"She said that you weren't home." Oscar said quietly.

"And they disagreed, so they tried to fight her."

Hazel took a deep breath and had to do everything in his power to school his expression so that none of the anger or sadness that was beginning to take him over was going to be able to boil over. If the boy was going to be upset, then it was for the best if he didn't let himself add to it by getting upset himself.

He had to think hard on whether or not he wanted to prod Oscar along though. The boy, no, not just a boy, Hazel had to remind himself, was not necessarily ready for this conversation.

Oscar wasn't a day over sixteen and Hazel knew that for a fact. He'd been there the day that the boy had been born and placed in his arms, squealing, covered in blood and viscera, and all too fragile.

He took a quiet breath in through his nose, trying nto to sneer, and a moment later Hazel decided to keep going. "And what happened after that?"

Oscar's eyes seemed to glaze over at the question, and Hazel couldn't pretend as though he was surprised by it. This was the heavy topic that neither of them wanted to breach.

Hazel knew what happened next, just as well as Oscar did.

He'd been too late to get there and save them, or that was what Hazel had thought. He'd felt the wood burn around his arms, and to that day Hazel still carried those scars. He'd made a decision long ago not to let his aura heal those injuries.

Deep down, Hazel wanted to carry those scars as a cruel reminder of everything that he'd ever done wrong.  
But now, with Oscar sitting there on the other side of the bars and watching him, Hazel didn't know that it was worth it at all. Hazel closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "It was the fire, wasn't it?"

"It was." Oscar replied quietly. "She took me and we ran as far away as we could." He paused, looking up at Hazel and now able to really bore into Hazel's soul. It was enough to make Hazel want to shrink back entirely, but he didn't dare allow for that to happen. Hazel was a great fighter, he was one of Salem's right hand men.

There was no use in letting himself get broken down as things stood.

"I'm sorry that I left you behind."

The words left Hazel's mouth before he could even think about what he was saying to the boy. There was a lot of emotion behind them that he couldn't quite muster to bring forward properly. Oscar seemed to pick his head up at the utterance though. His mouth had dropped open a little bit in surprise as she watched him.

"What-"

"You heard me." Hazel answered. "I shouldn't have left you behind."

"That's right." Oscar almost growled the words out at him. "You shouldn't have." He sat up straight and glared across the bars at Hazel. "Who were they anyways?"

"Enemies." Hazel mumbled, thinking back to a job that he'd taken long ago. "I made some enemies when I was working to keep food on the table. Not because I wanted to, but because that was a side effect of my work."

"But you were a huntsman."

"I was." Hazel replied calmly, since he was sure that he was about to present an angle to a situation that Oscar never would have expected otherwise. "Being a huntsman isn't all good, Oscar." He paused, realizing something all of a sudden. Hazel let his eyes slip shut and relaxed his neck, letting his head fall forward slightly as he concentrated.

He grit his teeth and ignored the pain as he pushed his aura out and away from his body in an attempt to get a good feeling of whether or not Oscar's aura was there and active.

It was there, and it was far, far too strong. 

Hazel's aura snapped back to him painfully, but he'd gotten everything that he'd needed to know.

It wasn't something that Hazel had been expecting. There was a certain sort of familiarity in the feel of Oscar's aura, but there was something that was distinctly off about it. His eyes snapped back open and he looked up at Oscar. There were a thousand questions that were beginning to buzz at the back of Hazel's mind, and he didn't know which ones he wanted to ask.

But he wasn't going to get the chance to ask the first question, it seemed.

Oscar was staring at him in disbelief. "What do you mean it's not all good?" He paused. "You're supposed to be the protectors of the world, you're supposed to-"

"The duty of a huntsman is to protect." Hazel repeated calmly, almost like he was going off with an old lesson that he'd learned at Beacon Academy back when he'd been young. "That is true, but there is more to it than just fighting monsters."

"So you worked for one instead?"

That was one something that Hazel wasn't going to be able to sidestep as a topic. Apparently at some point, Oscar had learned plenty about him that Hazel had never said.

Being a known agent of Salem was ultimately the biggest problem he had to face, it seemed. He couldn't blame anyone else for being wary or untrusting because of that. Especially not Oscar..

And that left Hazel with the very distinct question of how he was going to be able to explain anything in regards to Salem to Oscar. Or to anyone, rather. Nobody aside from his teammates would be able to understand the value of working for Salem.

Nobody was going to understand.

Definitely not Oscar.

"You don't want to know where I made enemies?" Hazel asked, deciding that he wanted to sidestep the issues that were at hand. "You just want to know about that?"

Oscar faltered. His eyes went all wide as he tried to figure out where he wanted to go next in his questioning. For Hazel, it was almost easy enough for him to think about what was going on with Oscar in terms of the boy being prey in a trap.

Like a bug in a spider's web.

"I..." Oscar started, his eyes flicking down to the floor. "Yeah," He finally said a moment later. "I think so."

"Alright." Hazel replied with a quiet sigh. "What have you heard about me?"

"What have I-"

"What have they told you, Oscar?"

Oscar looked down at the floor and took a deep breath like he was doing his absolute best to calm himself down. When he finally spoke up, there was something that almost made his voice crack. "They haven't told me that much." He explained quietly. "Just that you work for Salem and that-"

"That I've killed people?" Hazel cut Oscar off before he could find out what the specifics that he'd been told were. "Or something else?"

"That you've killed people." Oscar said quietly, repeating Hazel's words like he thought it was all that he'd need to explain his situation. "And that you've been working for Salem for..." He paused, his eyes flicking over the tiles of the floor. "A long time, I guess."

"I have been." Hazel mumbled. "And I won't deny that I've killed people. It's not worth lying about that."

Oscar nodded. He reached out for himself, wrapping his arms around himself in something akin to a hug and Hazel couldn't help but feel bad about it. He'd never seen a more obvious sign that young Oscar was in distress over everything that had been happening. The boy had never done anything to comfort himself, aside from that moment where he'd begun to talk to himself.

There was a part of Hazel, a part of him that he'd thought that he'd buried a long time ago, that told him that Oscar needed him. The responsible thing should have been for Hazel to pick his hand up and reach out to offer something to make his son feel better. That's what a good father would do, he would offer his son words of advice and comfort, and he'd do something to keep things more comfortable afterwards.

But Hazel wasn't a good father. That was something that had been cemented in his mind long ago. He didn't want to see what happened if he tried to be that to Oscar now.

It would never work.

Hazel knew that.

"Why would you kill people?" Oscar asked.

It was the one question that Hazel was sure that he was never going to be able to answer properly for his son. It was too complicated, and there were too many layers that he didn't want to pick through. Oscar seemed to be a good enough kid. He didn't need to be put in a situation where he was going to have to find out that there were a lot of ways for someone to be able to justify murder.

Hazel was still coming up with new reasons every time that he went out on a mission for whatever reason.

Not that he'd let Oscar know that.

"It's complicated."

"But that's not-"

"Oscar." Hazel repeated the boy's name, rather distinctly disliking the way that it sat sour on his tongue. So many times before he'd said it with love in his heart, or looking for an apology.

Saying it to a boy that he was sure had died long ago was something else entirely. The love was still there, the frustration was there too.

Hazel didn't think that he was ever going to be able to really rationalize everything in his mind when it came to this particular thing.

"What?" Oscar asked, picking his head up to look at Hazel.

All at once, Hazel became all too aware of what the gap between himself and his son was like. There were the bars, of course, and then there were three paces between the bars and the wall that Hazel was sitting against. Even after that, Oscar seemed to be a pace or two away from the bars on the other side.

Like he was afraid of Hazel, and deep down, Hazel couldn't blame the boy for feeling that way.

"I'm sorry that I left you behind." Hazel mumbled, not sure who he thought was going to accept the apology. "You didn't deserve that."

"Yeah, well." Oscar's brows knit together in distinct frustration, and a moment later he spoke up. "You did, and I don't accept your apology."

Hazel let out a too-quiet sigh, and worried for a moment that Oscar had overheard it. "I can't say that I expected you to."

Oscar nodded and stood up, stepping away from his chair. Hazel stood up himself, taking the first few steps towards the door since he thought that it was going to be a chance for him to communicate with Oscar properly. It was the first time that he was going to get a proper up-close look at his son.

The boy almost entirely froze in place as he waited there by the bars. Hazel reached out for them, wrapping his hands around the bars and leaning in slightly. Oscar didn't look like him, not that much.

Hazel couldn't have been glad for it. It was better for the boy to be free of him in that way. The fewer people could judge Oscar because of him, the better.

"What do you want?" Oscar asked, looking up at Hazel. "You don't-" He stopped himself, balling his hands into fists as he tried to figure out the best way to go about things. "What do you want from me?"

Hazel paused, not really sure how he was supposed to answer the question. In theory, he knew that there were ways that he should have been able to answer for himself.

But none came to mind.

The things that drove him to get a good look at Oscar like he wanted now were purely emotional. They were without proper explanation.

"I just wanted to see you." Hazel said finally. He shook his head. "I've spent..." He cut himself off, deciding that Oscar didn't need to hear this. It was better if he didn't. "It doesn't matter."

Oscar was quiet for a long time. He didn't seem to move to leave, and Hazel let out a sigh and focused his eyes on the floor instead of the boy. It was safer that way.

Finally, Oscar spoke up.

"I've thought about you a lot too." Oscar said quietly. "If that's what it is."

"I thought you were dead." Hazel mumbled finally. "Just wanted to get a good look at..." He cut himself off. Too emotional. "At what you've grown into. That's all."

Oscar blinked and stared up at Hazel, wordlessly. Hazel stared into his son's eyes, unsure of what to say.

"I'm sorry."

Oscar nodded and his eyes flicked down to the ground. An eternity of silence stretched between them.

Despite the fact that he'd been preparing himself for Oscar's response, it still hurt and ached in his chest.

When the boy left, the words still rung in his ears as Hazel resigned himself to his fate.

"I don't forgive you."


End file.
